Bush Is No Conservative

by Paul Craig Roberts

The conservative movement in the United States
has been stamped out, not by liberals but by neoconservatives. Conservative
philanthropic foundations, conservative print media, and conservative think
tanks have been taken over by neoconservatives, who have exiled real conservatives
to voicelessness and joblessness.

Neoconservative translates as "new conservative." However, there
is nothing at all conservative about neoconservatives. The name is a misnomer
of the first rank. Neoconservatives believe the U.S. can deracinate foreign
cultures and remake foreign countries in America's image. True conservatives,
following Edmund Burke, do not believe that a country can be shorn of its social,
political, economic, and cultural ways and made anew from the ashes.

Modern history bears out this opinion. The Jacobins of the French Revolution
were going to transform not only France but also all of Europe, but no such
thing happened despite the abolition of feudalism in 1792 by the National Assembly,
the guillotine, and France's military dominance of Europe for two decades.

The Bolsheviks were going to transform Russia, but after 75 years of an unaccountable
Communist Party, Russia has emerged more capitalist than when the Communist
transformation of Russia began.

Mao undertook to transform China by exterminating landlords, merchants, and
private property, but today China is emerging as the leading capitalist power
of our time.

There was no skimping on the expenditure of human life in behalf of the great
cause to remake human society. Victims of the Communist "transformation"
of Russia and China number in the tens of millions.

All of these outcomes reinforce the genuine conservative's confidence in Edmund
Burke. The only people who are intent on repeating the mistakes of the past
are the neoconservatives, who believe they can remake the Islamic world in America's
image.

In the face of the total failure of their plan to remake Iraq and Afghanistan,
neoconservatives continue to say that America must deracinate Islam and put
in its place a women's-rights democracy. On National Public Radio recently,
neoconservative Joshua Muravchik reaffirmed that it was America's job to remake
Islamic society.

Neoconservatism is actually a more extreme form of revolutionary utopianism
than that of the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins. The Soviet Communist Party was
content with trying to remake Russians. The Jacobins ran out of steam early,
and Napoleon reinstituted the old order, dispensing titles of nobility and crowning
himself emperor. Only neoconservatives are sufficiently ignorant and delusional
as to believe that America's overthrowing an Arab leader will result in Arab
states reconstituting themselves in the West's image.

Neoconservatives have demonstrated an unrivaled ability to detach themselves
from reality. Americans should be terrified that delusional neoconservatives
were able to seize control of the presidency of George W. Bush and commit the
U.S. to two illegal wars that have been lost and that have isolated the U.S.
from the rest of humanity with the exception, of course, of Israel.

The lack of any connection to reality makes the neoconservative print media,
such as the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial
page, and National Review so absurd as to be unreadable. The Dec. 4 issue
of National Review, for example, has a cartoon portraying a U.S. soldier
in Iraq pondering the 2006 congressional election results. An Iraqi kid is tugging
on the soldier's trouser leg and saying "say you won't go, Joe!"

National Review's editors are as lost in delusion as President Bush.
And they are just as irrelevant. It boggles the mind that there could be a journalist
anywhere on earth who is unaware that polls of Iraqis consistently show that
large majorities of Iraqis are "strongly opposed" to the presence
of U.S. troops in Iraq, believe the U.S. occupation makes them less secure,
and approve of the insurgent attacks on U.S. troops.

When Bush says that the U.S. will stay in Iraq and Afghanistan "until
the job is done," what job is he talking about? The slaughter of civilians?
The destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and entire towns such as Fallujah?
The incitement of civil war? Recruitment for al-Qaeda and the provision of a
training ground for Osama bin Laden's followers? The fostering of Islamic extremism
throughout the Middle East? These are the real results of Bush's occupation
of Iraq, but they are not what he means by "the job." In true Jacobin,
Bolshevik, Cultural Revolution, neoconservative fashion, the job Bush wants
to accomplish is the deracination of Islam and the recreation of Muslim society
in America's image. It is impossible to imagine a less conservative goal.

Bush has taken America far beyond the role of being the world's policeman.
Bush is America's first Jacobin president. He is as far from a conservative
as it is possible to be.

Paul Craig Roberts
wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall
Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National
Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including
The
Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has
held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon
chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International
Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover
Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous
scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions.
He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award
and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal
of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell.

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